Want to know what really makes the aristocracy tick? What they think about morning, noon & night? It's breeding. It’s pedigree. Achieving the best possible gene pool. No, not for themselves, but for their cows.
The cream of society is obsessed with bovine ungulates. And cream! Milk and yogurt too, but mostly beef. To many, the cow is a utilitarian beast, hoofing about and gassing up the atmosphere before making itself useful under a slather of Béarnaise.
But to the owners of Britain's grandest estates, they are a vital part of the landscape, breaking up the view from the library and filling it with life & colour. They are ornamental yet practical; majestic, but homely. They are adored; as much part of the family as the Lurcher or the Labrador.
A status symbol in many cultures. Among the Masai wealth is measured in cows; a dowry for the wife typically costs 10. To Hindus they’re sacred beasts.
In Britain & Ireland, to own a cow means you're either a farmer or rich, or both!
In the 18th century, squires would commission oil paintings from George Stubbs or Paulus Potter of their prize specimens – great slabs of majestic beasts on curiously stumpy little legs.
Cattle are a vital weapon in county oneupmanship. Anyone can show poodles, but Longhorns? The Rothschilds fly their cows in from Canada; at Daylesford (the Cotswold epitome of 'posh' where shopping is only done with Diners Club or Amex and the car park can cause one to gawp!) the Bamfords (of JCB digger fame) feed theirs only the finest organic hay. The Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, who keeps Jerseys, Holsteins & Irish Moileds at her 2,000-acre Clandeboye estate in Co Down Ireland, has a barn known as Claridge's, so luxurious is the straw.
Like keeping racehorses, cattle-showing is not for the feeble-funded. But it's not about the money, it's about the glory, and about having more rosettes than your neighbour. There is a myth that the English upper classes are diffident and uncompetitive. The myth persists because it is usually true. But not when it comes to their cattle.
They don't like foreigners at Rousham, well not when it comes to cattle. Only English breeds have graced this dreamy Oxfordshire landscape since William Kent laid it out in the 1730s, and that's how Charles and Angela Cottrell-Dormer plan to keep it. 'We don't like Continental breeds,' says Charles Cottrell-Dormer (universally known as CCD), 'Second-rate, tasteless beef.' His family has lived at Rousham since 1635, though his great-grandmother 'mucked up' the house in 1875, adding a 'completely unnecessary' Victorian wing.
By comparison, his great-grandfather used to keep Longhorns for milking, though the herd was sold in 1927. Two new herds and some Anguses have been built since 1971. They take a different letter of the alphabet for heifers each year: 'K was tricky. We had some silly names, like Kanga.
Meeting the owners of Rousham is a joy to behold. They personify a much-held belief that the British landed gentry are a breed apart and possess a special gene; a gene that today is sadly disappearing.
This generation of old-school aristocracy is being supplanted by a thrusting privileged set; the type intent on spending Daddy’s fortune and living the high life, out only for themselves, for celebrity fame & fortune.
The generation represented by Charles & Angela, represent an era of low-tech, an era of austerity, of make-do and mend, a duty to conserve the estate. Eccentric, even batty. Yes, they are all of the above, but simply quite wonderful. Lunch or drinks after a Sunday church service on the estate is a riot of laughter, stories, banter and bonhomie.
It is down to generations of this same family over centuries past that Rousham remains loved and unsullied, cherished and remarkably intact and unchanged exactly as William Kent intended.
Rousham is astonishingly little known or visited. Do visit please, but don't tell everyone, because I rather like it that way...
My personal tip is to come early, as you may find you can have one of the greatest gardens in the world virtually all to yourself. But don’t expect a tea room or a shop or even a solitary postcard! Bring your own packed lunch & drinks and wear sensible shoes. The only nod to the 20th century is a second-hand ticket machine for the £6 entrance ticket by the car park, but even that’s a recent addition, the honesty box used to suffice.
To understand Rousham it might be best to understand William Kent first; his influences, the period in history and then look at the garden, of which, Monty Don famously said “Rousham is my favourite garden in England”
Mind you, not that Monty has to be the arbiter of taste or media sage on garden history, but I trust his judgement and perception, concurring as he goes on to say “it [Rousham] is a staggering work. I think Kent was a genius, a true genius and he is right at the top of his art here.”
Designer Biography: William Kent (1685-1748)
Kent: The Polymath
Kent was a polymath; turning his hand to all manner of artistic endeavours from painting and architecture the design of furniture, sculpture, ceremonial robes & metalwork. His talent also shone in interior decoration, book illustration, theatrical design, costume design and only latterly landscaping gardens.
Born in Bridlington, Yorkshire, England in 1685, as William Cant, he originally trained as a coach painter and painter of theatrical scenery.
Attracted by his painting skills a number of East Yorkshire patrons paid for ‘Grand Tour’ studies in Rome where, for 10 years, Kent lived and studied painting. He made a living by also buying paintings and selling them to the English aristocracy as house furnishings.
Whilst in Rome he made formative connections with Lord Burlington & Thomas Coke. The latter, as the Earl of Leicester, would later commission him to design Holkham Hall, Norfolk
Burlington was so impressed with Kent's artistic vision that he brought the young Yorkshireman back to London with him in 1719. There Kent designed and built furniture and temples on a classical theme for Burlington and his friends.
He continued with his painting, but at Burlington's urging, he branched into architecture, where he became quite fashionable.
Kent The Courtier
Kent arrived back in England during a transformational time in British culture. The last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, had died in 1714, and the Hanoverians, led by George I, had come to the throne.
The artistic styles of France and the Low Countries were associated with the Stuart regime and thus immediately fell out of fashion. A search began for a new style that would define Britain. Wealthy aristocrats looked to the arts, architecture and design of Italy for inspiration, believing that society could be renewed and improved by a new direction in art and culture.
The Earl of Leicester was an early exponent of architecture inspired by Italy and asked his friend Kent to create Holkham Hall as an extant monument in tribute to the concept of the ‘Grand Tour’.
Kent: The Able Copier
A form of design was emerging that was inspired by the British architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652) and the Venetian Andrea Palladio (1508-80); Anglo-Palladian style.
Whilst Kent would never be classed a great artist, his work being rather restrained, as Burlington had hoped, he was soon recognised as a very able copier of Palladian classicism. It was in this context that Kent re-launched his career in Britain.
It didn’t start overtly well as at Kensington Palace he charmed the surly King George I, redecorated Kensington Palace for him with a clumsy bravura, and survived the subsequent critical storm – just. Notable successes amongst Kent’s commissions would be the original interiors for Chiswick House and his ‘tour de force’ Houghton Hall, Norfolk for Sir Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister.
William Kent would come to play a leading role in establishing a new design aesthetic for this crucial period when Britain defined itself as a new nation.
Kent: The Charmer
He was a high camp Yorkshire bachelor - he loved the glitz and the sparkles of white and gold. He was plump and a man whose extravagant humorous and camp manner showed in his work. He was also a career designer who rose like Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown from being a clever, if not dyslexic, small-town boy through the exploitation of his considerable talents and of patrons of all political persuasions to be a wealthy and respected man.
Evidentin Timothy Mowl’s biography ‘William Kent: Architect, Designer, Opportunist’ Kent is, and was not, universally liked. “William Kent (1685-1748) was great, without a hint of gravitas, a con man who became one of the artistic geniuses of his age”.He arrived back from Italy pretentiously liking to be called "Kentino” and peppered his conversations with Italian phrases – hardly endearing.
He avoided attending site as often as possible, was reputedly often drunk or late, or both, invariably unreliable and careless on details of construction, poor at executing to plan, but charismatic & affable, well connected and could schmooze & charm the aristocracy and his way out of most problems!
Kent: The Picturesque Gardener
Arguably Kent’s most original contribution to the history of the decorative arts in Britain is as a landscape designer. Yet Kent was no horticulturalist. He envisioned the landscape like a classical painting, carefully arranged to maximize the artistic effects of light, shape, and colour. As the father of the "picturesque" he was not above planting dead stumps to create the mood he required!
His gardens were dotted with classical temples replete with philosophical associations, a fact which would have been readily apparent to his learned patrons.
Famously described by Horace Walpole as having 'leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden', Kent added a new pictoral, classical and natural approach to gardening, having been heavily influenced by what he had seen in Italy on the Grand Tour. It would transpire that Kent would be viewed as the ebullient founding father of the Landscaping Movement
His association with Stowe, the most celebrated of English landscapes of his time was hugely influential. He smoothed away the rigid lines of the formal gardens to create sinuous shaded walks. Those same sinuous walks are replicated in Rousham. In Stowe’s Elysian Fields he appliedthe innovative grace of seemingly natural lawns, lakes and clumps of trees. It signalled the demise of formal gardens and parterres.
Rousham, begun in 1738, is without doubt his most important garden work and probably his greatest and his most influential.William Kent died ten years later in 1748, but his contributions to the 'natural" gardening style which evolved into the English landscape garden cannot be overstated.
Rousham House and Gardens:Overview
Most landscape gardens are a pastiche of several designs, one laid upon another, and almost all of Kent's have been altered, most of them by Capability Brown.
Many of Kent's buildings have survived, including Worcester Lodge at Badminton and Horse Guards in London, but Rousham Park gives us a precious glimpse of Kent's landscaping art and his genius.
Kent’s garden designs were a snub to the rigid formality of what had gone before. He did away with flowerbeds within sight of the house, to give the impression that the surrounding lawns merged seamlessly into the park beyond.
Burlington introduced Kent to the owner of Rousham, General James Dormer, an old soldier who had served with the Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim. Dormer enjoyed the company of the fashionable artistic set of the day, and often had figures like Swift, Pope and Horace Walpole to stay with him at Rousham. He recognised Kent’s brilliance, and asked him to make alterations to his house and redesign his garden. ‘If Kent can be persuaded to come I shall take it very kindly,’ he said.
Pope’s Genius of the Place was duly consulted, and Kent created the magic that Rousham still possesses to this day. He dressed up the Jacobean house, built by Sir Robert Dormer, with a straight battlemented parapet, and glazed the windows with octagonal panes. Kent's exterior is today almost as built, but in 1876 the original octagonal glazing was replaced with new-fangled large sheets of plate glass, (hideous!) during a heavy-handed restoration by the architect James Piers St Aubyn.
“Kent immediately stretched Rousham’s relatively small garden of just 25 acres by adding a sham ruin, the “Eyecatcher”, to the horizon beyond the River Cherwell. Rousham was the first place to embody Pope's concept of "calling in" the surrounding countryside to the garden. This gives the impression that Rousham’s landscape extends far beyond its boundaries. A similar inspired deceit is employed with the sloping lawn from the Bowling Green lawn down to the Cherwell. It’s not overly long but the eye is tricked by the slope”.
Animals were kept at bay by an invisible ha-ha, and everywhere is verdant glory. To be fair Burlington had built the ha-ha, but it was Kent's quirky sense of humour that gave the feature its name in posterity. When Kent led unsuspecting visitors to the ditched boundary edge, he always exclaimed, "Ha-ha." This landscaping device had become popular in France some 30 years earlier and became all the rage at keeping animals out without interrupting the view. Bridgeman and Kent were amongst the first to employ the ha-ha in Britain allowing designers to merge the garden into the landscape - adding considerable prestige to the landowner's estate when viewed from the house.
A statue of a satyr in Venus Vale Rousham is as remarkable for its landscaping as for the ideas it represents. This is an Augustan landscape. It captures Britain’s renewed confidence as the nation looked beyond its borders to conquer, plunder, or ply trade, according to your view. Contemporaries saw the peace and prosperity of 1st-century Rome reinvented at Rousham.
A path plunges into woodland, a ha-ha allowing long-horned cattle into the view without allowing their muddy reality into this little Arcadia where Satyr, Mercury and Bacchus live.
Thick mats of laurel float under the upper storey, their glossy leaves reflecting the different light coming in from above. Paths disappear around corners, tempting you to discover what lays beyond. Areas of heavy shade press you in tight and release you into open glades of grass and still ponds. something new, unexpected, and beautiful in its elegant simplicity. At one point, a thin rill of water catches your eye and then disappears around a corner. The rushing water pulls you into a small opening in the canopy where an octagonal pool of water appears, completely still except for the small trickle of water pouring in from the rill.
In the dappled shade of woodland, a formal rill materialises and leads down to The Cold Bath beside an Octagonal Pool. Kent’s Venus Vale is unchanged apart from the cherubs, now vanished, that once rode the swans on either side of the goddess, and the fountains just in front of Venus, which are now rarely more than a trickle thanks to the shifting water table.
Most of what can be seen today is Kent’s work although, as at Stowe, Kent is working on a framework
of cascades, fountains, square pools and wilderness created by Bridgeman. Given that the pair collaborated on several projects, Kent must have been influenced by Bridgeman and, while at Rousham, he must also have been influenced by Pope who had a room at General Dormer’s home.
What is palpable is Kent’s lightness of touch.
Whilst the renovations on the house were extensive (as seen in the plan) Kent simply augmented the landscaping already completed by Bridgeman who died in 1738. The genius of Kent was to pick-up a plan that wasn’t of his creation and augment it with such brilliance.
Whatever its provenance, the new informal, “natural” style exemplified at Rousham is at the heart of the English landscape movement. Kent’s masterpiece is captivating and continues to fit Walpole’s description of “the sweetest little groves, streams, glades, porticoes, cascades and river imaginable”.
Characteristic Features
William Kent is sometimes seen as the founder of the English landscape movement, the style which helped to shape and mould continental Europe’s great estates as well as New York’s Central Park.
It is probably more accurate to say that the style emerged from various landscapers, including Kent’s contemporary Charles Bridgeman, and some of those associated with the pro-Whig Kit-Cat Club. The Kit-Cat Club included Kent, the poet Alexander Pope and journalist Joseph Addison whose garden commentaries in the Spectator leave a fascinating record of the period when landscaping was honoured as one of the fine arts
A palette of green in light and shade
Rousham is about simplicity and quality of design. Kent’s Rousham is not a flowery garden; there are flowers, but they are elsewhere - separate from the rest of the garden that is Kent’s masterpiece.
The effect of travelling down a shadowy green tunnel (and some areas are very dark) towards an object in the light is intensified by the simple plant palette. The garden is series of incredibly strong contrasts: light & shadow, sunshine & shade, cut & uncut grass, nature vs man-made, a formal mown lawn separated from a long grass meadow by a ha-ha.
Grass is the unifying surface throughout Rousham but used in many ways; a mown border edge a chamfered (45°) bank around a raised or sunken lawn, a narrow grass path that slows you down as you walk, versus a big wide path that moves you on quickly. Ideas that Kent employed that we still use today
Laurel. Light & shade. A muted green palette. Rousham in just one picture!
Trees, shrubs and grass compose the structure that defines a Rousham year There are no signs or suggested routes through the garden and yet invariably everybody follows the same route, because Kent uses subtle, but simple devices to draw you through the garden.
A thread led by design
Rousham has a subliminal threadthat pulls you through the garden. When you leave the lawn, you are drawn under the trees by the rounded shape of a clipped holly. The clipped curve is like a magnet that seems to pull you towards it. Moreover, at Rousham, no matter the weather; sunny or overcast & raining, you are constantly moving from light to shade and vice-versa as the garden unfolds in a sequence of wonderful features, from Kent’s seven arched Praeneste and the ponds and cascades in Venus’ Vale, to the cold bath and serpentine rill.
At Rousham, you wander through dappled light, under overhanging lime trees and through banks of clipped Portuguese laurel. Using laurel in this way is typically 18th-century and it has a lovely purity to it. The laurel at Rousham acts as an under-storey for trees. It creates weight in the garden and makes a formal contrast with the trees growing free and wild above.
A canopy of Limes underplanted with laurel - a prescriptive feature of Kent’s work.
Statues & Iconography
In terms of characteristic features the statuary and garden building are integral to the garden.
Rousham has a number of statues and classical temples, but sadly many more have been stolen in the intervening 280 years, notably a number from (now empty) alcoves in the Temple of Praeneste
Seven arched Temple of Praeneste
The iconography and philosophical associations of buildings inspired by classical Italian architecture will have been understood by educated learned patrons and associates who may have taken part in a ‘Grand Tour’, a culturedversion of our ‘Gap Year’!
The garden can be read as the iconography of Dormer’s military career. It gave life-long pleasure to the old general who never fully recovered from wounds sustained at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. It can be dangerous to make connections, but many see the Dying Gladiator, breathing his last as a Kentian reference to his client General Dormer afflicted by his war wounds
Rousham’s annual laurel prune
Ordinarily laurel is one plant I would struggle to recommend in any garden. It’s brutish and needs control to avoid it getting tall and woody. Of course, that also applies at Rousham.
Laurel is invariably used by the man on the Clapham Omnibus as a quick growing screen, markedly different to its use here where it’s use as an under-storey provides formal dense ground cover.
Having taken part in Rousham’s 6 weekly annual prune of acres of laurel - to waist height with just secateurs & loppers (no power tools are used) - I constantly marvel that the laurel never got out of control in the 280 years since Kent’s vision was realised.
Walled Garden Colour
Gradually you are led back to the lawn and delivered, through an ancient, knotty yew hedge and a wrought-iron gate, into a hidden walled garden. Now, after all that cool green, there is an amazing sensation of colour. You’re in a magical garden away from the Kent landscape with the ghosts of old apple trees and around the edges, a big, blowsy Edwardian-style double herbaceous borders and trained apple trees on mellow brick walls. The contrast is marked but serves only as a prelude for the sensory assault to come.
Pigeon House Garden & The Dahlia Bed
Moving from the double herbaceous borders into another smaller more enclosed walled garden with huge dovecot, the riot of colour continues. Unlike Kent’s landscape which is 250-280 years old, the planting of this garden is a mere 70+ years.
The brashness of the dahlias is a refreshing antidote to the verdant Kent garden
The dahlia bed has been here since CCD’s mother created it in 1946. Post war, dahlias were fashionable, giving vast quantities of flowers to pick for the house. The remarkable thing about the Rousham dahlia bed is not just its scale, but also it has survived in the same place for 70 years.
Ann Starling (Rousham Head Gardener) and the Pigeon Garden Parterre
In other walled gardens, as dahlias fell from fashion they were replaced by permanent herbaceous perennial beds, but here dahlia continuity has gone unbroken. Dead heading in Rousham is done daily but generally only takes 15-30 mins. Given the gardens at Rousham are open every day of the year the dahlia bed is central to late autumn interest It’s earned its keep, so it stays.
The same nearly 500 tubers are lifted and stored in the cavernous cellar below the main house every winter. Usually, it’s a bad idea to plant the same thing in a border for 5 years let alone 70 years, but with dahlias this is obviously not the case!
References
· ‘William Kent: Architect, Designer, Opportunist’ Timothy Mowl
· ‘Lives of the Great Gardeners’ Stephen Anderton
· ‘William Kent’s English landscape revolution at Rousham’ FT.com 21/3/2014
· ‘Posh Cows’ Tatler Magazine April 2014
· ‘The Perfect Garden’ Gardens Illustrated
Historical Period
English Landscape (1730s)
“Rousham is restful, spacious, time-worn and beautifully paced. Whatever season you visit, the garden always reveals something afresh. It is a magical landscape, an exercise in restraint and classical narrative, where anything seems possible. It has been hugely influential.“Dan Pearson, garden and landscape designer
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